[Xmca-l] Re: Hegel for Social Movements

[Andy Blunden]

Right. I never saw chs 5&6 of Thinking and Speech as being 
about Linguistics. I took them as being about /concept 
development/. There is indeed a vast synergy between Hegel 
and Vygotsky, when you line LSV's developmental psychology 
with Hegel's Logic. Striking. And the /differences /in 
detail are interesting too.

But this close comparison of Vygotsky and Hegel is the topic 
of another book. This is for social movements. I "use" 
Vygotsky and CHAT people will see it, but until the last few 
pages it is a kinda hidden agenda.

Andy

------------------------------------------------------------
*Andy Blunden*
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/index.htm
On 2/09/2019 7:20 am, David Kellogg wrote:
> Andy--
>
> So it's not "Hegel for Linguists"? I'm not so sure. It 
> depends what kind of linguist you are, I think. 
> Systemic-functional linguistics is an explicitly Marxist 
> approach (see Halliday's "The Influence of Marxism", in 
> "Halliday in the Twenty-first Century"), and Halliday 
> himself got his start in linguistics in one of the great 
> social movements of the twentieth century--the Chinese 
> revolution. Ruqaiya Hasan certainly knew Hegel better than 
> I did.
>
> The reason I mention it is that, we are re-translating 
> Chapter Five of T&S to be Chapter Ten of Pedology of the 
> Adolescent (we thought this would involve minor changes, 
> but our language skills have changed alot since we did T&S 
> twelve years ago). Being rather "visual-illustrative" 
> (there's a good Russian word for this, but no very good 
> word in English), I got caught up in your God's Eye View 
> of the Hegel universe on p. 157. And the left leg of it, 
> the Logic, still looks to me like a map of Chapter Five/Ten.
>
> Syncretic heaps are pure being--they are based on 
> quantity, quality, and measure. Complexes are syncretic 
> heaps which are reorganized by reflection, by appearance, 
> and ultimately (pseudoconceptually) by actuality. The real 
> concept is the unity of subject, object, and idea--but 
> also a recapitulation of the syncretic heap (Subject 
> only), the complex (Object), and the Act-ual.
>
> Vygotsky struggles a little with the Logic because it's 
> kind of "outside in": the genetic law insists that every 
> function appears twice, first inter- and then 
> intra-personally. That means that the child's own 
> development happens for others before it happens for the 
> child himself or herself. And that means that the starting 
> point is not one but two.
>
> So for example Paula Towsey, in her paper in MCA ("Wolves 
> in Sheep's Clothing", Towsey and Macdonald 2009), says 
> that Vygotsky uses "pseudoconcept" in two contradictory 
> ways--first, as an umbrella term that covers ALL the 
> complexes (and that's how she's labelled her pictures). 
> Secondly, as a unique stage WITHIN complexes--the highest, 
> transitional form, the bridge to the concept.
>
> I think one way to resolve this contradiction is to say 
> that Chapter Five/Ten is abstraction in action--it's a 
> kind of desert island on which children play without 
> adults, and the child's forms of thinking display what 
> they would be without any adult influence. But what we see 
> in "real" life is mostly pseudoconcepts, because in real 
> life the starting point is not one but two.
>
> David Kellogg
> Sangmyung University
>
> New Article:
> Han Hee Jeung & David Kellogg (2019): A story without 
> SELF: Vygotsky’s
> pedology, Bruner’s constructivism and Halliday’s 
> construalism in understanding narratives by
> Korean children, Language and Education, DOI: 
> 10.1080/09500782.2019.1582663
> To link to this article: 
> https://doi.org/10.1080/09500782.2019.1582663
>
> Some e-prints available at:
> https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/KHRxrQ4n45t9N2ZHZhQK/full?target=10.1080/09500782.2019.1582663
>
>
>
> On Mon, Sep 2, 2019 at 1:58 AM Helena Worthen 
> <helenaworthen@gmail.com <mailto:helenaworthen@gmail.com>> 
> wrote:
>
>     OK, OK, I get it. I am a bit behind in doing my
>     reviewing assignments because of shifting house from
>     Vermont back to CA. My first reaction after whipping
>     through Andy's first chapter was an uncanny sense that
>     this book was indeed written directly with me in mind.
>     I guess “Me” would mean any person who started out not
>     being “political” (in my case, an English comp and
>     literature person) and came into the world of social
>     movements by bumping up against reality often enough
>     and now wants to make sense of it.
>
>     OK, I’ll get on it!
>
>     H
>
>     helenaworthen@gmail.com <mailto:helenaworthen@gmail.com>
>     helena.worthen1
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>>     On Sep 1, 2019, at 6:30 AM, Andy Blunden
>>     <andyb@marxists.org <mailto:andyb@marxists.org>> wrote:
>>
>>     Glad you're enjoying it, David. I hope that I will
>>     have my copies soon too! Both you and Helena have
>>     managed to get copies before me!
>>
>>     Your questions: (1) Hegel does tend to deal with
>>     topics in terms of the very end points and extremes,
>>     and this has brought a lot of criticism and
>>     misunderstandings down on his head, especially from
>>     our generation. Mainly I deal with it by simply
>>     ignoring the passages of Hegel which go to God and
>>     the Absolute Idea, World History and so on. I
>>     recently put an article on my website and Hegel and
>>     Teleology, in which I specifically advised people to
>>     read Hegel without obsessing on these excesses. I
>>     should have put something to this effect in the book.
>>     You are right there.
>>
>>     (2) Hegel's writing on language are in the Philosophy
>>     of Subjective Spirit, and they are not very
>>     interesting, I thought, in the context of linguistics
>>     today. But I can imagine that if Linguistics was your
>>     thing, then reading the Logic you would see Language
>>     everywhere. It is like that. But my book is "Hegel
>>     for Social Movements" not "Hegel for Linguists."
>>
>>     (3) I must have not made myself clear, David,
>>     somehow. Hegel completely supported the Haitian
>>     Revolution and he was a complete Realist in
>>     International Relations, which he called "the animal
>>     kingdom of the spirit." He said states should honour
>>     treaties that they have entered into, but that's all.
>>     Quite confronting for the modern reader. It was Kant
>>     who promoted a "United Nations" and Fichte who used
>>     recognition of national sovereignty as a model for
>>     intersubjective relations. For Hegel, there was
>>     nothing higher than the nation state.
>>
>>     The term "immanent critique" actually dates from the
>>     Frankfurt School. Hegel never used the term. But the
>>     Logic is clearly the model of immanent critique.
>>     Hegel was actually pretty dogmatic in how he
>>     critiqued his contemporary protagonists.
>>
>>     Andy
>>
>>     ------------------------------------------------------------
>>     *Andy Blunden*
>>     https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/index.htm
>>     On 1/09/2019 8:15 pm, David Kellogg wrote:
>>>     I'm reading "Hegel for Social Movements", and I
>>>     highly recommend it, particularly to Helena.
>>>     Although Andy doesn't say very much about his own
>>>     rich experience in trade unionism, it clearly
>>>     illuminates a lot of his examples.
>>>
>>>     I have three questions though. They are questions
>>>     that I kept stumbling over when I read the Logic and
>>>     I have yet to really find anything that answers them
>>>     in Andy's book.
>>>
>>>     First of all, why is Hegel so big on purity? He is
>>>     always talking about pure being, and absolute idea.
>>>     I guess I don't believe in purity--I not only don't
>>>     believe it exists, I am not even sure it should exist.
>>>
>>>     Secondly, one of the delights of Andy's book is that
>>>     he likes to switch back and forth between (e.g.) the
>>>     Logic and the Grundrisse.  Bloomfield remarks that
>>>     when he read Capital he thought it was a book about
>>>     linguistics (because of the part on exchange value
>>>     and use value, which does look kind of Saussurean if
>>>     you squint a little!) A lot of what Andy is saying
>>>     about how movements become first conscious of their
>>>     own existence (there is a line like that in
>>>     Malraux's "Les Conquerants"--les coolies ont
>>>     decouvert ils existent, seulement qu'ils
>>>     existent....), and then become conscious of their
>>>     internal differences--these seem to be statements
>>>     about the development of LANGUAGE and not simply
>>>     language-pure consciousness. So why so little
>>>     explicit treatment of language?
>>>
>>>     Thirdly, Andy sometimes slips into Hegelian (rather
>>>     than Marxist) politics, e.g. on Haiti (p. 55) and
>>>     and when he considers "international law" an
>>>     absolute (35). Haiti did not slip
>>>     into neocolonialism because of some lack of
>>>     international civil society but BECAUSE of that
>>>     "international community" and still is!
>>>
>>>     (Andy--I thought "immanent critique" (the practice,
>>>     not the term) was Kant, not Hegel! How is Hegel's
>>>     use of the practice different from Kant's?)
>>>
>>>     David Kellogg
>>>     Sangmyung University
>>>
>>>     New Article:
>>>     Han Hee Jeung & David Kellogg (2019): A story
>>>     without SELF: Vygotsky’s
>>>     pedology, Bruner’s constructivism and Halliday’s
>>>     construalism in understanding narratives by
>>>     Korean children, Language and Education, DOI:
>>>     10.1080/09500782.2019.1582663
>>>     To link to this article:
>>>     https://doi.org/10.1080/09500782.2019.1582663
>>>
>>>     Some e-prints available at:
>>>     https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/KHRxrQ4n45t9N2ZHZhQK/full?target=10.1080/09500782.2019.1582663
>>>
>
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